We cannot but distrust the soundness of recent German policy, with its grandiose visions of universal empire, if we consider it in the light of other things which happened when the world was somewhat younger, though possibly no less wise. The great imaginative conquerors, though the fame of their deeds still rings down the ages, do not make so brave a show, when we begin to examine into the permanency of their achievements. The imperial projects of Alexander, of the Habsburgs, the Grand Monarque, and Napoleon--each of whom drew out { 108} a vast pattern and worked to it--are not among those things which can be said with any justice to have endured. None of them were ever fully achieved; while some were broken in pieces, even during the lifetimes of their architects.
To treat the whole world as if it were a huge garden, for which one small race of men, who have worked busily in a single corner of it, can aspire to make and carry out an all-comprehending plan, is in reality a proof of littleness and not largeness of mind. Such vaulting ambitions are the symptoms of a dangerous disease, to be noted and distrusted. And none ever noted these tendencies more carefully or distrusted them more heartily than the two greatest statesmen whom Prussia has produced. Frederick the Great rode his own Pegasus-vision on curb and martingale. The Great Bismarck reined back the Pegasus-vision of his fellow-countrymen on to its haunches with an even sterner hand. "One cannot," so he wrote in later years--"one cannot see the cards of Providence so closely as to anticipate historical development according to one's own calculation."
Those very qualities of vastness and symmetry which appear to have such fatal attraction for the pedantocracy repel the practical statesman; and woe to the nation which follows after the former class rather than the latter, when the ways of the two part company! To the foreign observer it seems as if Germany, for a good many years past, has been making this mistake. Perhaps it is her destiny so to do. Possibly the reigns of Frederick and Bismarck were only interludes. For Germany followed the pedantocracy during a century or more, { 109} while it preached political inaction and contentment with a shorn and parcelled Fatherland. She was following it still, when Bismarck turned constitutionalism out of doors and went his own stern way to union. And now once again she seems to be marching in a fatal procession after the same Pied Pipers, who this time are engaged, with a surpassing eloquence and fervour, in preaching discontent with the narrow limits of a united empire, and in exhorting their fellow-countrymen to proceed to the Mastery of the World.